Archive for the ‘Sarah Palin’ Category

This is what Sarah Palin posted some months ago. It has apparently just been taken down. It was posted by Kossack leolabeth here:

Most of the people on this list were defeated in the recent election.

At this moment, there is no reason to believe that the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords was politically motivated. But many Democratic congressmen, including Giffords, have been threatened with death in the atmosphere of violence and evil that the Republican Party invoked in order to seize power.

Like this:

Alaska’s Republican Senator, Lisa Murkowski, was defeated by a Tea Party nominee who is far more extreme than she. Apparently with the help of the progressive community. That means he can be defeated:

In the final 48 hours, a popular local radio host interviewed Miller and framed Murkowski as a “rabid abortionist.” This in itself would have riled up the Christian conservative base, but on top of that there was an added bit of ballot bait this time around. Ballot Measure 2 stated that doctors of any girl 17 years of age or younger needed to notify her parents if she sought to have an abortion, or face felony charges. Like red meat to the wolves, Ballot Measure 2 brought out the Right to Life crowd in force. Churches devoted entire services on the Sunday before primary day to talking about why congregants should support Measure 2. Signs promoting “Alaskans for Parental Notification” showed up in their lobbies…

Another mitigating factor were progressives who, trying to play political chess and overthrow Murkowski, crossed over and voted for Miller. The logic was that Miller, a far right fringe candidate, would be far easier for the Democratic candidate to beat in a head to head race with all Alaskans in the voting mix. And this may come to pass. [emphasis added]

But this is not just a matter of defeating a bad guy. It’s a matter of supporting a good guy. Continuing:

Scott McAdams, little known to Alaskans outside the southeast pan-handle, is a popular small town mayor. He runs the city of Sitka and has balanced budgets, focused on education, served on the school board, and has even figured out how to sell water to India. He was a deckhand on a commercial fishing boat all over the state, and is all the kinds of things that Sarah Palin said she was, before the media began to shine a flashlight in all the dark corners. He’s a “real Alaskan” in the style of the politicians of old, before oil was discovered and turned a libertarian blue state reddish.

— Why do obvious smears and lies such as those directed against the Park51 development get so much media play? Could it be because our corporate-run, Republican-worshiping press keeps giving prime media space and respect to contemptible bigots like CNN’s Erick Erickson?

Pawlenty scored 1 percent in a poll of Republican presidential hopefuls released Monday by the Iowa Republican, putting him in a distant tie for sixth out of 10 candidates in the poll.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won the 2008 Iowa caucuses, led at 22 percent, followed by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 18 percent, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 14 percent and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin at 11 percent. [Sarah Palin polls eleven times as well, proving once again why John McCain picked her as a running mate over Pawlenty.]

The one bit of good news for Pawlenty is that three potential candidates included — former Sen. Rick Santorum, Mississippi Gov. Hayley Barbour and Texas Gov. Rick Perry — failed to reach the 1 percent threshold.

What’s more humiliating than losing out on the #2 spot on the 2008 Republican ticket when a pretty grifter who spews word salad catches John McCain’s, erm, eye? Getting your ass kicked by a full order of magnitude, courtesy of that same word-salad-spewing grifter — and knowing that she in turn is bested by Huckabee, Romney, and Gingrich.

Give it up, Timmy. You destroyed your home state in order to win the favor of the GOP base nationwide, and they still hate you and think your mom dresses you funny. Just give it up, go into the ignominious exile you’ve earned, and be glad we haven’t actually grabbed a rail with which to run you out of town.

A note to journolisters who may not be aware of this: “Downs child” is NOT an appropriate or sensitive way to refer to Palin’s son, who has Down Syndrome. Please use “people-first” language here. I’m not at all a fan of Palin, either, but as liberals and decent human beings, we should be respectful in how we refer to people with disabilities.

Now remember, Carlson’s trying to cherry-pick these private e-mails to find something with which to attack non-conservatives. If this is the worst he can do, no wonder Palin feels the need to feign outrage.

To be fair Zhu concludes that overconsumption — spending too much on housing, cars and credit cards account for more of the total burden of bankruptcy than medical events, divorce or unemployment, as McArdle wrote.

But as McArdle completely failed to acknowledge, Zhu does so while using somewhat more stringent standard for counting medical expenses as a factor in bankruptcy than other scholars employed — as he explicitly acknowledges. He concedes the continuing significance of medically -induced bankruptcy. He acknowledges what he believes to be a weak underweighting of that factor (because some people pay for medical expenses on credit cards). And he notes that a number of other studies, not limited to those co-authored by Warren, come to different conclusions.

In other words: McArdle correctly describes one conclusion of this paper in a way that yields for its readers a false conclusion about what the paper itself actually says. And look what that false impression implies: if medical bankruptcy is a trivial problem, society-wide, then Warren can be shown to be both a sloppy scholar and, as McArdle more or less explicitly says, a dishonest one as well.

And that leads me back to the thought that got me going on this post. It seems to me that what we read in McArdle here is a genteel excursion into Andrew Breitbart territory. Like the Big Hollywood thug, she misleads by contraction, by the omission of necessary context, by simply making stuff up when she thinks no one will check (again, see the footnotes for examples). And like Breitbart, she does so here to achieve more than one goal. The first is simply to damage Elizabeth Warren as an individual, to harm her career prospects.

So why does TNR have her on staff? Simply put, she says things that make rich and powerful people feel all warm and gooey inside. Or as Levensen states:

Perhaps lying is too harsh a word — but the serial errors that all fall on the side that supports her initial claims and that recur again and again in her work suggest to me that something other than mere intellectual sloth and sloppiness is the driver.

Ordinarily, such a record wouldn’t matter much, especially in journalism. In theory, a series of clips as riddled with error as McArdle’s would end most careers in high prestige journalism. Hot Air might still find a use for you, but The Atlantic?

But the problem is that McArdle is useful: she advances an agenda — that which comforts the comfortable — and she does so with what I think is truly her original talent, the capacity not to notice the ridicule and ferociously dismissive debunking that she so often attracts.

Being able to be wrong in a form and fashion that aids the powerful, and possessing the ability not to mind a life that must be thus lived in willing embrace of error…now that’s a trick.

Which is why no one who cites Megan McArdle as an example of anything except wrongness put in the service of corporatism should ever be taken seriously.

Regardless of what one thinks of Obama’s speech, Palin’s incoherent response should remind everyone that it was the sort of oncological, unrestrained capitalism Palin and the Republicans espouse (complete with total regulatory capture of the government entity we all thought was monitoring them) that made this crisis possible.

— Question: If somebody like Alan Grayson (with a “D” after his name) had said this instead of Joseph Cao (a freshman Republican), what’s the likelihood that David Broder and the rest of the GOP/Media Complex would be in full Tone Troll Mode, doing their level best to hound him or her out of politics?

So, G. Gordon Liddy, totally unrepentant and uncooperative, involved in multiple crimes including the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg’s office got as severe a sentence as repentant, cooperative David Kernell may get for a single crime. Because of changes in the parole process, Kernell is likely to serve the full 20 years, while Liddy served 4 years. Because of changes in the latitude for judicial discretion on parole, Kernell is likely to serve a stiffer sentence than even Liddy, and will certainly serve more than John Dean. This is fair?

And John Yoo, he’s guilty of nothing at all. Same for Dick Cheney, George Bush, and even the lower-level people who actually murdered suspects in cold blood.

Let’s hope that the judge understands how grossly inequitable would be the result that Sarah Palin thinks is just.

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Seems that, after spending the last week attacking the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll that polled the opinions of Republicans, FOX News has decided to cite data from that poll in order to support an argument that Chris Wallace was making — namely, that Sarah Palin has a shot at the GOP nomination:

Of course, FOX was careful not to use the words “Daily Kos” in connection with this poll when they cited it. But anyone familiar with the poll or with Research 2000 knows who was behind it.

Washington authorities are seeking Maurice Clemmons, 37, for questioning in the slaying of four Washington police officers. Clemmons is wanted in Arkansas, where he has an extensive criminal record…

My source says the man wanted for questioning is believed to be the same Maurice Clemmons as an Arkansas ex-con with an extensive record of armed robbery who became a subject of some controversy for political reasons. That Maurice Clemmons was among those who became controversial for having received a commuted sentence from then-Gov. Mike Huckabee in 2000 (of a 35-year armed robbery sentence), then went on to commit other crimes. This has the potential of making Wayne Dumond look like a small-timer…

The Fundies had no problem with Huckabee’s pardoning a violent rapist as a way to tick off Bill Clinton. But they will have a problem with another of the Huckster’s clemency recipients going out and killing four cops. Sarah Palin must already be dancing for joy here — Huckabee was the main obstacle to her Hoovering up the Fundie contingent for 2012.

Come on, Racist Moonie McCain, Pam “Atlas Shrugs” Geller Oshry, AmSpec, and all the rest of you! Apologize for either calling him a liar or implying it strongly, and for using that claim to mobilize your readers against Gryphen. Or are you totally without morals, decency, and/or honor? (We already know you have no brains.)